First Day of Work

First Day of Work - Pulled it off

So overall, this was as to be expected. Woke up at 6am, did my paperwork, hurried to work. Mind you I'm rockin my only clean shirt.

But it's all good. Grapefruit juice for breakfast =( I was one of the earlier ones. Good start. And they had coffee with breakfast. Success. The rest of the analysts seemed pretty cool. As expected, something like 6 girls out of a class of 28. In some sense it’s much like college, except now you have people that are engaged all around you. I’d still say that is more welcome than an obnoxious frat boy crowd. There are certainly a couple of those in the crew, but at the very least, you can have an intellectual conversation with them. I guess one could say this is a relatively matured version of college. The competitive nature probably explains it. It turned out that the numbers behind the competition was actually 1 offer to 100 applicants that applied. Success.

Majority of my peers seem to live in the "happenin" areas of Dallas, namely, The Village and Uptown. Both areas I considered before I moved, but they all are at LEAST 30 minutes away from work. I decided to hedge my potential of always being dangerously close by being only 15 minutes away... and I cannot say I ended up in a boring part of town. It's apparently not too bad. But we'll see. I have the next 5 months to think about it.

Most of the day was lectures and speeches. We had one activity where we actually had to do a presentation on two of the values of the company. Talk about HR cheese… but oh well. It was amusing, out team did a skit for one.

Afterwards, it turned out that a couple of the guys at my table were interested in rockin the ping pong table after work. Success. We got a solid 8 people to come out. And then we went out to happy hour and got dinner uptown to Primo’s. My first time seeing actual uptown. Good times. Nice to establish a bit of a network already. And had good tacos with a Margarita.

Tomorrow, I actually have a whole day at a hotel! Richard Fairbanks, the chairman of the Capital One will be there addressing the first timers… and a couple hundred other associates. Still cool to see the CEO. And we already have plans for Wine Therapy – apparently a live music venue that might have 2-4 musicians perform tomorrow. We’ll see how that works out. The shady poker player type was the one organizing the outing.

This last bit was actually written out of Astoria, a nice little coffee/wine shop just outside my apartment. Very quaint little place. My waitress Teddy, was actually Bulgarian. The place is apparently owned by Bulgarians. And Hotel California just came on the speakers. Awesome.

Over and out. Back home.